The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (15 page)

On the evening of May 12, 1956, Elizabeth invited Monty to a small dinner party at her home on Beverly Estate Drive. “It was a going-away party because we were going on location,” Dmytryk recalled. Monty had spent the day with Jack Larson, who left Monty at 5 p.m. to go to his mother’s house to see a TV show starring his favorite actor, Claude Rains. Neither Monty nor Jack owned a television set. “Monty told Florian to go home as it was getting late in the afternoon,” Larson recalled in 1999. “He told me, ‘I’m not going out.’ After I left, Monty talked to Elizabeth and said, ‘I’m exhausted and not coming.’”

Elizabeth persisted, explaining that she wanted to fix Monty up with a hip young priest who was a fan of his. “He says ‘fuck,’ but I don’t care what he says, I want to stay home,” Monty said, feeling drained from listening to the Wildings’ problems. Elizabeth called back numerous times, and finally he consented, driving his car up what Jack Larson describes as a “winding, peculiar road.” After turning from Benedict Canyon Drive, Monty started driving up the frightening, almost vertical ascent to Elizabeth’s house at 1375 Beverly Estate Drive, negotiating several treacherous curves, including one sharp right angle that seemed to lead directly into the front door of a house. Teetering on the brink of a yawning gorge, the deadly little street is a death trap just waiting to snap shut on drunk drivers.

Elizabeth’s dinner party had already dragged on for four hours when Monty arrived around midnight. A heavily sedated Wilding lay on the couch as Elizabeth listened to Sinatra records on the hi-fi, which Wilding thought “unbearably indiscreet” of her.
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Rock Hudson was visibly bored with Phyllis Gates, and Kevin McCarthy was reluctantly sipping the Wildings’ lukewarm rosé. “Monty had one glass of sherry and no drugs,” Jack Larson said, but according to other accounts, he consumed several glasses of wine, later slipping into the bathroom to drop two downers. When Wilding saw him swaying, he said, “Monty, how are you?” Monty replied, “None too gorgeous,” using a phrase that customarily signaled a bout of depression. Elizabeth pressed a drink on him and begged, “Don’t look so sad . . . I want everyone, most of all you, to be happy with me.” According to Wilding, “Monty brushed her aside and got unsteadily to his feet, saying, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, sweetie. Not feeling too gorgeous, you understand.’” Rock noticed his stupefied condition, took his arm, and said, “Time for me to pull the blinds down, too.” Elizabeth and Michael stood in the doorway, waving goodbye, and then went inside and rejoined the others.

It was a little after midnight. “Monty wasn’t sure if he knew the way out and asked Kevin to lead him down,” Larson said. “Kevin drove in front of Monty to lead him back to Benedict Canyon. After that, Monty could find his own way to Canter. Going down the hill, Monty fell asleep at the wheel. He was prone to fall asleep. That’s when he hit a post.” Kevin stopped and walked back to the wreck. Monty was crouched under the dashboard, blood spurting from his head. “Kevin went back to the house to call an ambulance,” Larson continued. “Then they all rushed down the road to the crash site, and Elizabeth saved Monty’s life. His top front teeth were lodged in his throat.” Telling him, “You’re going to be all right, Monty darling, you’re going to be all right,” she rammed her hand into his mouth.
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“She got the teeth out from his throat,” Larson said. “He was a total mess, cheekbones fractured, jaw broken on both sides, nose broken. Rock Hudson and the priest were there. Michael Wilding was—well, confused.”

Finally, Monty’s doctor, Rex Kennamer, arrived. Monty said, “Dr. Kennamer, meet Elizabeth Taylor.” Kennamer and Rock managed to pull Monty from the wreck. “The film,” he gasped. “I’ve got to be at the studio.” Elizabeth was holding his head in her lap. “Don’t worry about the studio,” she said. “We’ll shoot something else.” She accompanied him in the ambulance to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she and Monty received intravenous sedative injections. “His head was so swollen that it was almost as wide as his shoulders,” she recalled. After Kennamer told her it was “a miracle” he’d survived, she went home and collapsed in a state of “shock, anxiety, worry, depression,” Wilding said. Apart from facial injuries, Monty had suffered a cerebral concussion. He would be nine weeks recuperating, spending part of the time in traction to correct severe whiplash. His jaw been set sloppily and had to be rebroken.

“Those of us close to him had always been surprised by his public image, and often talked about it and said we would never put up with the kind of person described in the press, this creature they write about—a drab, introverted, tortured person, which he was not in any way, shape, or form,” said Jack Larson. “The comedian Nancy Walker was close to him, I was, Libby, who was tons of fun, was, and Roddy McDowall, who was also great fun, was a good friend, and Elizabeth loved him. Then came the accident and things changed totally. His face was destroyed. It made a difference in his relationships to people and how he thought about himself. I know that. His feeling about himself changed. He always tried to spare people as much as he could any unhappiness. After the accident, Monty stayed with me and I saw him through as much as I could . . . A lot of people behaved very badly—they just wanted him to finish that film
Raintree County
which he shouldn’t have done.

“At the time of the accident, Libby came out to be with Monty. She told him he needed to come back and spend several years recovering with the very best doctors back east and not Hollywood doctors, and slowly get plastic surgery. Instead, they had shot him full of things, and he developed a scar tissue he shouldn’t have had. Elizabeth was wonderful, visiting him almost daily in the hospital.”

One day she walked in his room and discovered him with Libby, who glared at Elizabeth and blamed her for letting Monty drive his car alone. “Screw off,” Elizabeth said. Nurses at Cedars gossiped about how the movie star and the Broadway diva nearly came to blows over the actor’s bandaged and trussed body. Libby called Elizabeth “sensual and silly . . . a heifer in heat.” Later, as Monty lay in traction at his rented home, McCarthy was shocked to find him sipping martinis through a straw after Libby restocked his bar. When he recovered, he was scarcely recognizable as Montgomery Clift, appearing pinched and withered. The famous gull-wing eyebrows were now shaggy thickets, the left side of his face was almost paralyzed, the once heroic jaw-line was soft and mushy. His eyes looked dead, no doubt due to pain, bewilderment, and massive dosages of barbiturates.

The film was temporarily shut down, but “insurance covered it,” Dmytryk said in 1998. “We waited; Van Johnson had been hurt during the 1940s, and Metro waited until he’d healed up and finished the picture. We did the same thing. Accidents happen to movie stars too.” Scenarist Millard Kaufman and his wife Lorry spent many evenings looking after Monty during his convalescence. “He had more guts than any hero he ever portrayed,” Kaufman said in 1999. “He was in constant pain. He came for dinner. Lorry had made him some very nourishing thin liquid soup, and she had a very wide straw for him to drink it through. He looked like he’d had bad cosmetic surgery. The studio’s attitude was: ‘Let’s get him back on the stage and get the picture out fast.’ Monty was exhausted. When he came back to work, we shot all day on a Saturday. I called Dore [Schary] and said, ‘Give us Saturday off or Monty’s going to die.’ Elizabeth was also having a bad time—trouble with Michael Wilding.”

Though Dmytryk never entertained the thought of replacing Monty, some of Metro’s executives wanted to dump him, since he now looked more like a scarecrow than a movie star. Elizabeth warned Schary that Monty would kill himself if the studio fired him. Monty was reinstated in his role when the filming resumed after a nine-week suspension. Dmytryk was impressed with Monty’s valor and recalled, “He remained a very funny, amusing personality. No matter how hurt he was he wouldn’t complain. He was in great pain, so he went back to drugs and liquor, and that shows in the film, but not much. You can’t tell what was shot before the accident and after it. We made absolutely no attempt to photograph him any differently, except that once he returned to work, we rarely shot in the afternoon because the sun was out and it was hot. I love Monty, I thought he was a great great guy, but I swore I’d never work with him again because it was just too difficult. It took 125 days. It was too much responsibility—he was too much trouble, but I’ll say this: almost everyone else I know who gets drunk becomes nasty. The only one who didn’t get nasty was Monty Clift. He just fell apart.”
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During the production’s hiatus, Elizabeth had exploded at Wilding and he’d walked out. He’d turned down the stage role of Henry Higgins in the U.S. touring company of
My Fair Lady
—the same role that made Rex Harrison one of the biggest stars in the world. Aside from not having appeared on a stage in twelve years, Wilding quite logically feared having one of his epileptic seizures during a live performance. “You’re nothing but a coward,” Elizabeth told him. “To think that the man I once loved turns out to be nothing but a coward.” It was more than even the masochistic Wilding could take. When they separated on July 19, 1956, Elizabeth explained, “It wasn’t that we had anything to fight over. We were just not happy, and I think it was showing in the two boys.” Wilding resumed his affair with Dietrich, who told Maria Riva, “He is a new man, now that that awful woman that made his life so miserable is gone. Now, we have to get his children away from her.” Riva immediately went to Wilding and warned him, “For God’s sake, don’t ever let her near your boys.” Meanwhile, Dietrich and Wilding were making love “so energetically,” according to Riva, “that they broke the double bed in the guest-room.”

Elizabeth felt “dead, old at twenty-four, with no reason for living out the day,” she recalled. All that would soon change when she met dashing, able-bodied Kevin McClory, an employee of flamboyant producer Mike Todd.

Chapter 5
Mike Todd
A 414-DAY JOYRIDE

“It was on
Raintree County
that she met Mike Todd,” said Millard Kaufman. “It was very difficult for her.” One of the difficulties was that Elizabeth was already involved with Todd’s assistant director, Kevin McClory, who later coproduced the James Bond thriller
Thunder-ball
. McClory was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Irish screen-writer and cinematographer who was working on Todd’s all-star movie
Around the World in 80 Days
. After beginning as a production assistant, he was put in charge of the second unit, eventually becoming Todd’s number one sidekick. According to Todd’s son Michael Jr., his father was taken with McClory’s “wit and Gaelic charm.” Perhaps because of McClory’s speech impediment—a stutter—Todd referred to him as “Klevin.”
¹

As a lover, McClory was as lusty as Elizabeth, exhibiting the same confidence and go-for-broke drive that had made him a WWII hero. “He’s campy,” she said, using a favorite gay term for her latest sex partner, and McClory described her as “totally pornographic.” One day she phoned him at the studio, and Mike Todd somehow got wind of it. A few days later Todd told him, “Everybody knows who you’re seeing, and I don’t think it’s right.”
²

The clever, underhanded Todd hatched a plan to steal Elizabeth from McClory, inviting her aboard his rented 117-foot yacht
Hyding
. “As his invitation coincided with the day of my visit to the boys,” Wilding recalled, “Liz asked if she might bring us along too.” Elizabeth had already caught sight of the forty-nine-year-old Todd in the MGM commissary and thought, “Oh, he’s quite good-looking for a producer. He glanced at me a few times and I thought he had very pretty eyes.”
³
A native of Minneapolis, Todd had kicked around Broadway for years as a Times Square high roller in the tradition of Sky Masterson in
Guys and Dolls
. After producing Broadway spectacles like Gypsy Rose Lee’s
Star and Garter
and Mae West’s
Catherine Was Great
, he teamed up with Orson Welles to bring Jules Verne’s
Around the World in 80 Days
to Broadway in the 1940s, but left Welles stranded on the road, craftily retaining the film rights. His current mistress, the witty, intellectual Evelyn Keyes, a blond dazzler with elegant cheekbones, had appeared in one of the most popular postwar films,
The Jolson Story
, but remained a second-rank star. The title of her autobiography,
Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister
, alluded to her turn as the fretful spinster Suellen in
Gone with the Wind
. A dishy account of her marriages with superior men like John Huston and Artie Shaw, Keyes’s memoir revealed her to be anything but a wallflower.

Aboard the
Hyding
that summer day in 1956, even a sophisticated paramour like Keyes was no match for Elizabeth in her form-fitting flamingo pants and a violet cashmere sweater that brought out the glory of her eyes. “Todd fell for Liz the moment he set eyes on her,” Michael Wilding recalled. “After a few minutes in his company she was at her sparkling best, her mood matching Todd’s wit and overflowing exuberance.”
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As the Wildings drove home later, Elizabeth told her husband that Todd was a man who could get anything he wanted once he’d set his heart on it.

The Wildings saw Todd again that summer at a small barbecue given by Todd and Evelyn Keyes in their Hollywood Hills home. In full view of Wilding, who’d been introduced to everyone as Elizabeth’s husband, Elizabeth proceeded to flirt with Todd as they floated in the pool, sitting back-to-back on a large air mattress. “Our backs were about three inches apart,” she recalled. “It was as though my spine were tingling.” The other guests included Eddie Fisher and his wife Debbie Reynolds. Later that night Eddie told Debbie that he was not impressed by Elizabeth. “She has skinny legs,” he said. “I could never go for someone like that.” Years later, Debbie reflected, “When your husband says that about a woman, she’s the one to watch out for.”